I recently finished some scenery work that I started way back in...July? Can that be right? Three months away from the layout? This was a busy summer. Anyway, while looking at some prototype photos of the Old Allatoona Road grade crossing, I noticed the road actually travels through a slight cut after crossing the tracks. Although the cut is low, it is quite noticeable (as you can see in the Google Maps imagery below) and modeling it would be a nice way to tie the layout to the real thing. The photos below show how I modeled this feature.
» Photos
I began building the hill behind the tracks by shaping some plain old green floral foam. I carved the hill to shape before affixing it to the layout using Loctite construction adhesive. I applied the hill right over the top of the existing scenery base, which had already been covered with dirt and some static grass:
I then covered the hill with Sculptamold to blend it in to the surrounding terrain. Since all of the hill except for the cut face along the road will be covered by foliage, I didn't spend too much time on this step:
Next, the hill was painted using my standard textured ground color:
Finally, the usual treatment of ground cover, bushes and trees were added. I rubbed most of the ground cover off of the cut face of the hill to reveal the red Georgia clay just as it appears on the prototype:
This small change resulted in a big improvement to the look of this scene.
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